Garth Brooks was in town the other night. It was last Saturday, and it was the first concert event in our brand new Protective Stadium, which for the past few weeks has been hosting all the games of the new USFL’s season (the playoffs will be in Canton). 50,00 Garth fans packed out the stadium. It was the event of the weekend. I didn’t go, but from what I’ve seen on friends’ feeds and just on social media in general, it was a time: happy, even ecstatic folks gathered in a space with the like-minded, singing their hearts out, thoroughly entertained, but also grateful and thankful to be there with Garth, with each other, in this place, past behind them, future ahead, tens of thousands of cell phone flashlights illuminating:
Some of God’s greatest gifts are…unanswered prayers.
I read an article this week – a good one, a fair one – about the new Star Wars experience at Disney World. It’s a LARPING experience – Live Action Role Playing –
In 2012, Disney spent four billion dollars to buy Lucasfilm, which produces the “Star Wars” films and TV shows, and acquired not just the imaginations at Lucasfilm but those of its fans. The creation of the Galactic Starcruiser suggests a wager: many “Star Wars” enthusiasts, not content with repeat viewings of “The Mandalorian” or dressing up as a Stormtrooper at a convention, will pay to experience this fantasy universe through live-action role-play, or larp. In a larp, players, often in costume, improvise stories and borrow from such genres as medieval fantasy, science fiction, and vampire movies. In the indie larp Dystopia Rising, people spend the weekend staggering around as zombies—or hiding from them. In Sahara Expedition, the Italian larp collective Chaos League, inspired by the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, leads archeological expeditions that dig for artifacts in the African desert.
For more than a decade, Imagineers—Disney designers and researchers—have been looking into larps and interactive theatre, and running “playtests” in the parks. In 2019, Disney opened Black Spire Outpost, which put some of its experiments into practice. Disney calls nearly all its employees “cast members,” and at Black Spire Outpost most cast members are Batuuan. As guests walk between gift shops and rides, the cast members invite them to role-play. A local in earth-toned robes might draw a visitor into his confidence, to sell her a lightsabre, while a hero from another planet leads a kid behind trash cans to hide from soldiers in white armor. At Black Spire Outpost, these interactions last for a few minutes; on the Galactic Starcruiser, they go on for two nights…..
The Starcruiser story is set amid the sequels. Just before the action began on the ship, the passengers gathered in the atrium. Two Stormtroopers, led by Lieutenant Croy, a First Order officer with a sneering British accent, walked out onto the second-floor balcony overlooking the space and told us that we were all under investigation for Resistance activity. We also met the cruise director and the captain, and the onboard entertainment, two humanoid aliens, one with green skin and one with purple skin. A mechanic in a blue jumpsuit, named Sammie, darted nervously through the crowd. Each character guided smaller groups down different story tracks as passengers decided what kind of role they wanted to assume. Resistance fighters trailed after Sammie, the captain, or the cruise director. First Order sympathizers did the bidding of Croy.
The afternoon progressed quickly: in the engineering room, a dark cavern full of pipes and machines, Sammie and a group of children in white and brown robes studied the schematics of the ship. Upstairs, on the bridge, a ninety-foot screen acted as a window onto space. Players stood in groups of four or five, twisting knobs and pressing buttons at control stations. Suddenly, tumbling rocks filled the screen and Wagnerian music began to play as we heard the dull crash of an asteroid glancing off the hull. I was already sweating when, as in the Monitor Celestra, a smaller spacecraft appeared. The Resistance fighter Chewbacca roared at us. By directing drones depicted through the window, we got Chewbacca onto our ship. (Another echo of Celestra: the Galactic Starcruiser is set in a less familiar part of the “Star Wars” universe, giving the Imagineers more room to make things up and putting less pressure on guests to do homework.)
There is a temptation, when considering these experiences – the ecstatic concerts (or sporting events), the immersive, interactive games and other kinds of role-playing experiences like cosplay on which people spend untold hours of their time and lots of money – and to think that religion is missing out, in a way. That feeling at the Garth concert? Do you ever get anything like that in church? What the larping and gaming and cosplaying experience adds to your life? Shouldn’t church give that to you instead – or at least, also?
Questions which then can inspire church leaders to either condemn or – more likely these days – jump on bandwagons, something we’ve seen over and over (through history, not just recently) – taking what seems to grab people in the culture, baptizing it, hoping to bring that same kind of engagement, investment, and emotion to the Lord – where it properly belongs, right?
Maybe not. Maybe the better answer is to observe all of this – and whatever it is that people seem to feel connected to and inspired by – and ask questions instead.
What is it in this that is drawing people? Community, involvement, shared values, challenge, problem-solving, creativity, simply fun and enjoyment?
Ask that question and learn, then, from Garth and the Larpers – not with an end of slavish, lame imitation, because that never works – but to listen to the human heart beating there, to discern what that heart is seeking – and finding – and understand that this seeking human heart is the same one that’s been beating from the beginning of time, and to start with trusting the ways that the Spirit has responded to that heart through time, yes, through this Church. Trust it.
To consider that perhaps the collapsing of religious experience and observance into a moment to gaze at each other in beige spaces in a flattened visual and auditory landscape misses something. That possibly the “vain repetitions,” adornments and elaborate, upward-pointing elements of religious observance of the past offered, not a wall, but a doorway: to a vision and experience that all were invited to enter and enjoy, hearts beating, reaching and yearning for community, challenge, beauty, excitement and most of all – the comforting presence of that understanding, challenging, comforting creator.
The common thread, it seems is this: the connection to something greater than me: Yes, other people as individuals.
But also: a group.
And also: A landscape, a world that’s interesting and different and maybe even wild and scary, but that still embodies values and realities I can clearly recognize and engage with – and a landscape and a world that is somehow a gift to me, that comes from the mind of another.
And somehow, in playing in the landscape gifted to me by this creative mind, I connect, not just with others – but with that very creative energy that seems to know and understand me, but that also invites me to the unending more that’s out there – familiar, but also unceasingly new, a place of comfort and adventure – waiting.
Charlotte was Both 